Morning In Newport

Original Watercolor 15" x 22"

by Bill Hudson

With Custom Frame.................$1,650

Just one of endless scenes captured while walking early mornings on the docks of Newport, Oregon.  

Discovery

by Bill Hudson

Not that long ago, all the stars in the entire universe were believed to be within our own galaxy, the Milky Way. It was estimated to contain over 200 billion stars and be about 120,000 light years across.

One hundred years ago in October of 1923, Edwin Hubble, driven by curiosity and persistence, made one of science’s greatest discoveries. From the Mt. Wilson Observatory, sitting 5,700 feet above the then-dark skies of Los Angeles, Hubble aimed the 100-inch telescope toward M31, a faint soft light then known as the Andromeda nebula. He set the telescope camera to capture all light emissions over a 45-minute exposure. The resultant image revealed three distinct points of light within a cloud of stars. Upon further study, he discovered one of the light points grew brighter and darker over repeated intervals. It was a “Cepheid variable” for which astronomers had collected decades of data on hundreds of similar stars. The collective luminosity and pulse length of such stars had proven to be dependable in calculating their distance from earth.

Hubble then made the calculations himself and realized the Cepheid was indeed far beyond our known universe. Andromeda was, in fact, a neighboring galaxy more than a million light years away. (Andromeda is now known to be 2.5 million light years from earth.) Hubble proved the universe is incomprehensibly larger than our Milky Way.

Now, with the benefit of the Hubble Space Telescope, and more recently the James Webb Space Telescope JWST, we estimate the total number of galaxies in the universe as 200 billion. . . or, there are roughly the same number of galaxies as stars in our Milky Way. And the farthest detectable galaxy from us is GN-z11 at 13.4 billion light years!

Watercolor

Over the years I’ve painted with several media including oil, acrylic, casein, gouache, ink, and pencil. All are unique and challenging. But none offer the excitement of discovery like watercolor. There’s a delicate balance between control and spontaneity when an artist relies on pigments suspended in concentrations of water applied to paper in varied states of dampness. Each painting is a dance. Surprises and unexpected effects are the norm as colors blend and bleed into each other. But for me, the greatest feature is that no other media can capture the luminosity of the sky like transparent watercolor.